Party Politics

March Primary Madness: War Abroad and Wild Results in Texas

Season 4 Episode 25 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions

Co-hosts Brandon Rottinghaus and Jeronimo Cortina delve into the latest news in politics

On this week’s Party Politics, Brandon Rottinghaus and Jeronimo Cortina break down the U.S. conflict with Iran and its political fallout, plus the chaotic Texas primaries. James Talarico edges Jasmine Crockett, John Cornyn and Ken Paxton head to a runoff, and several surprising results set up a heated road to November.

03/05/2026

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Party Politics is a local public television program presented by Houston PBS

Party Politics

March Primary Madness: War Abroad and Wild Results in Texas

Season 4 Episode 25 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions

03/05/2026

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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<Music> Welcome to Party Politics where we prepare you for your next political conversation. I'm Jeronimo Cortina. And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus. We're political science professors at the University of Houston. Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics. A massive week this week. Obviously, it's rodeo week, so everyone's psyched up about. Yes.

And cows, mutton busting and of course, Shaboozey. Yes.

And many, many more. But in the political world, it was as big of a chaotic rodeo. We have this ongoing conflict with Iran, which certainly is occupied headlines. And it's definitely reshaped the Trump presidency. Here in Texas, we had a primaries, one of the first in the nation's primaries, and just a wealth of things to talk about. So we're actually going to talk about it this week. And then we'll have another longer discussion about it next week, because it's like we have to go into overtime on this. There's so much going on. And obviously the shooting in Austin was tragic but has real political implications for what we're likely to see happen in the next legislative session. So let's talk about Iran. This is one of the obviously most important moments of a nation where you have this armed conflict. You've had several U.S. service personnel who have been killed in this action. Operation Epic Fury, as the Pentagon has dubbed the attack, started after the president implied that the Iranians had not essentially played ball and had leveled into being able to have a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons. There's a lot of explanations the Trump administration has given for why they're going to war, accusing them of mass terror, saying they want to have regime change. They backtracked from that a little bit. They're talking about the defense of kind of terrorist activity. So they have been a little bit unclear on the messaging, which I want to talk about as a political story. But obviously this has implications for what happens domestically in the U.S. but internationally in that region. So what are your kind of top level takeaways from the week's war? So the top level I don't know if it's one strategy like, generate these conflict and then rally around the flag. Yeah. But especially preparing for the midterm. But I don't think that that strategy is a winning strategy in any shape or form.

Why? Because we still have, Afghanistan. We still have Iraq in our minds. And those wars become or can become very, very complicating very, very, very, very fast.

Yes. The other implication is you can just it's not Venezuela that you go in, take Maduro. And that's the end of the story, because in Venezuela nothing has happened, yet. Right. Here a lot of things can happen. Yes.

So the. War is spilling over very quickly.

Spilling over. And, and it's creating a need. It's not clear that the regime or the system is down. Right.

That's that's one issue. And then the other issue is that what is the plan. Yeah. Like what's next? Why are we going to do.

Yeah. We hear Secretary Hegseth just saying it could take one hour, four weeks, five weeks. We may have troops on the ground. We may have not. We may do this. We may do that, so there is a lot of uncertainty. And the worst thing it has to do with oil. Yeah. And that could be a global disaster and push the global economy into a recession or high inflationary pressure. It's a great point. No.

And that means, yes, you've got serious political implications to the effects going on in the Middle East. And in addition to the loss of life, which has been significant, you've got civilians, you've got some combatants who have been killed. So there's a lot going on. You could say, I think the retaliation is obviously pretty impressive here. You've got, you know, within the first several days of the war that it is basically raise new fears about attacks against Europe and attacks against the US. Retaliatory strikes against Israel have been obviously increasing. A lot of folks there are hunkering down. The State Department has issued warnings saying, you know, be very cautious traveling in the area, saying you should get out if you can, but they can't really help you get out. So the, targets that Iran is targeting, are obviously things like the data centers, and kind of other related kind of events. And it's going to be pretty messy for a while. And I'm not sure the Trump administration is like prepared to handle the messaging on this. I mean, to one, there's this fear that they're kind of getting into these conflicts without any way to get out of it. This does have these kind of connections to the Iraq War, which, you know, back, you know, in the Bush administration was something that dragged down his presidency. Even to this day, people still use that as a kind of legacy defining moment for him. So this could be similarly problematic for the Trump administration. But in the near term, it's still the case that public opinion is kind of against this. I mean, you've got European leaders saying we should have had restraint in diplomacy. And the decision to strike was too fast. You were negotiating.

Right. And the number one negotiator in the world. Yeah. President Trump said, like, I'm not going to negotiate. You wrote a book about it, right? But you love to negotiate. And he said that I think, a couple of years of, well, like 2013 or something like that, that you should always negotiate, especially when you're talking to, to, to Iran and suddenly, I guess the pressure from Israel as some, media has reported, push or brought, the Trump administration over the line. Yeah. Yet another reason why the Trump ministration said they had to act was that they knew that Israel is going to act. They wanted to make sure that they were at the vanguard of that. That's not going to sell. Well, I think, you know, with the American people who, you know, we're basically told that we wouldn't be in forever wars under the Trump administration, like the kind of like videos that are making the rounds are of Donald Trump promising not to be in Forever Wars and chastising Democrats for being in these wars forever. So I think that's a real political liability. We start the midterms at war. That's not a good place for a president who promised to make domestic changes, right? If you look at the polling, basically, Americans are kind of split down the middle when it comes to whether the attacks were necessary. 41% say the strikes were necessary to prevent Iran from threatening the US, and 42% say that Trump should have pursued diplomacy in an extended way. The numbers are even worse in some cases. When you look at how supportive people are of the actual actions, 32% are supportive and 39% are opposed. So the split is not good. I mean, some of this obviously is Partizan. But you know, again, it's a question about inference. It's a question about priorities. And if the Democrats, as they already are saying, basically the Trump position is doing this in an illegal fashion, number one, which we need to talk about. But number two, that you're effectively, you know, not talking about the things the American people care about. You're spending billions of dollars on this conflict in the Middle East that you promised not to do. So what does that leave people? Yeah, it feels like a mistake. On behalf of the Trump administration. Now, presidents get involved in these kinds of affairs because there is a national security necessity. But I guess the question is whether or not you feel like this is a necessary kind of intervention and that it had to be done, or whether or some people are saying that this was like, kind of war of choice. Well, I mean, it clearly was, obviously there was no Congress authorization, at least this time, Congress or some members of Congress were informed, like, hey, by the way, we're just going to start bombing, Iran, with Israel. And the other important thing is, since when is, the United States following the lead of Israel in terms of getting into an armed conflict, right? I mean, I totally understand if Israel wants to do X, Y, and Z. But the big question here is should we have a process within Congress to. Yeah, you know, weigh in the pros and cons in terms of that. And I make sure that if the evidence was presented, Congress would have said yes, absolutely. Let's go for it.

Right. But at least you have that institutional backup right.

Here the problem with this is that the Trump administration is taking a very huge risk. And if all the plates are broken. The ones that are going to pay is are the Trump, administration.

Yeah, that's a good point. It has reopened this debate about who rightfully wields power in war powers and in American democracy. The War Powers Act outlines some of these specific things, and it's worth revisiting this. There were Democrats who said that they want to push this issue, and they are, but it's not likely to be passable. Right. You've got enough Republicans who are going to side with Donald Trump regardless of the issue, even though many of them are probably wary about this, and some of them have been very vocal about that. So I think that's probably the kind of where things will land. There will definitely be a revisiting of this in the future, but it's not going to happen now because obviously things are emergent and Donald Trump is effectively in control of the, of the, Republican Party. You know, in principle, Congress can't sort of stop the president. They're supposed to be the ones who declare war or pass some kind of a resolution to kind of give some guidance here. But, you know, it's irrelevant in large part because presidents frequently ignore the War Powers Act, right? They'll inform Congress about what they're going to do, but then execute.

Right. The auspices of their action is basically like, this is a national security issue, right? This is a defense issue involved. So president can get away with a lot under that kind of banner. So, you know, despite the fact that there's been some pushback, the justification from the Trump administration has been that negotiations weren't working, that they had to pursue this, that Iran sponsors terrorism. So that has to be dealt with. Iran had a serious, engagement with these protesters a few months ago, slaughtering them and killing demonstrators, which obviously was not a good look. Iran has restarted their nuclear program and to some degree is within days, of building an atomic bomb. But obviously this has been but, you know, two weeks away from building a bomb for the past 15 years.

Exactly. But that is exactly right. I mean, all those, reasons, if presented with the right evidence on and so forth would have made Congress. Yeah. At least, a majority saying, you know what? We're going for the resolution. As simple as that. I don't think that anyone, would have done it. I mean, even the mass murders that Iran did with their own people in terms of the protest is reason enough to say, okay, we're going to do. But then the other question is, what is civil society in Iran going to do? Once everything is gone or whatever it is, what are you going to do? Are you going to create, a Libya problem? One in some shape or form? What about other Western democracies? I don't see any European country very excited. Yeah, I'd say like, oh, yeah, we're going to go and help you out because they know, allies, right?

Right. And then you complicate even things even more. There were reports that Iran, were, shooting missiles to, Turkey. If that happens, can Turkey say, well, this is NATO and they pull Yeah, everyone in. Yeah. It's just it's just a lot of moving pieces. Yeah. That here perhaps restrained. Yeah.

On behalf of, Israel and the US would have been better. And then you have the political situation in Israel, right? Netanyahu, Prime minister, he's always, in these very weak, public arena, especially with, the war with Hamas. Now, your having entering the war with Iran, public opinion and Israelis deeply divided about the situation. And Netanyahu is trying to perhaps, with these war, trying to accomplish something internally, politically, in addition, that he's involved in, a couple of political scandals. So also the internal politics of Israel are extremely complicated and extremely volatile.

Light. Yeah.

In, in, in in this situation. I totally agree.

No. And you totally have a great point. I think about the this is something that people would have supported. Congress would have supported out on the right conditions. Democrats would have supported it too. Iran is a bad actor, there's no question. And the evidence is pretty clear, at least in bulk. And, you know, obviously, there's kind of evidentiary issue that we're used to seeing, in terms of like how things were in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that definitely is something that's sellable to me. The upside here for Donald Trump is that it would be a major effect, a major outcome, if he could have a regime changing moment here in the same way that Reagan had during that his time in office in the Soviet Union. So basically bringing down like, you know, number one, sponsor of terrorism in the world and stemming their killer capacity would definitely be a win. That's the best case scenario. But to get there, it's going to be a long haul and a political risk to make that all put together. You know, the Cold War started after World War Two. Yeah. And it was in the 80s with Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev, tear these walls down.

Yeah. Took a lot of external pressure, a lot of external. Pressure and didn't take. Let's go and bomb Moscow.

Right. And finally, the on this point, the real winners and everyone that is super happy is the, new Delcy Rodriguez, regime in Venezuela. Right?

They're like, thank God. You've predicted this, though. Yes.

Weeks ago you like the attention was focused elsewhere within like the next few months I know get a second. That's it. And now the big question is, okay, what about Venezuela? Like, hey, don't forget about Venezuela. Is that in the Middle East I don't remember. So it's it's the same thing. Nothing has happened there. And and that is a huge a huge problem, especially for our national security, given all the activities that Maduro and the regime were involved. So that's funny. Like the sprawl of this is really and like, you know, people are, you know, talking about how politics are so rapid fire these days. Of course it is. But like this is, I think, problematic from a foreign policy perspective, because what your goals are have to be pretty clearly outlined. And I'm not sure what that is, but I want to talk about this in the context of like what's next for the Republican Party. So Donald Trump gets the party in the country into these kinds of conflicts that they have to then own how they get out of it. You know, we'll sort of see. But, it strikes me there's not like a really clear plan, like they seem to have some objectives. But what this does to me in my mind is think about kind of what's next for the Republicans. And that's JD Vance and Marco Rubio. This conflict will define how they are seen.

Right? JD Vance, completely against these foreign interventions right from the very start, broke with Trump on some of these things, has been a little wishy washy when it's come to defense of this. But then you've got Marco Rubio, who's right in the middle of all of it. So you could see a kind of dynamic there where Marco Rubio comes a little bit ahead because he's the one carrying this for Donald Trump. JD Vance, maybe not as big a supporter, perhaps falls a bit behind. If you're looking to see kind of who's going to rally the MAGA faithful in the next election, then perhaps this is the of defining event of that. What do you think about that? I mean, it's a great point. Thank you. Yes, at least one, finally, now, the big question that I have is, first of all, how Marco Rubio is gonna balance all these 11,000 balls in the air, because in addition to that, you have a problem in Mexico, right? You have also started joint operations between US and Ecuador. Yes.

Right. And I don't know what else.

Busiest Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger.

Like. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Right. And he's Albright, right. He's managing all these things. On the other hand, Marco Rubio is also trying to repair, to a certain extent, the relationship with Europe and put it in in a, in, in a, I think in a good way, in the sense of, look, we're friends. Yeah, fine. But I cannot invite you and pay out every time we go out for dinner. Right. You have to pitch in, so you better to start pitching in, right and we can divide the bill, and that's perfect. And we love you. You get the tip. Right?

I'll pay for the rest. So the issue here is that particular moment, the fact that, Vice President Vance is not a factor in this thing. Might relegate him, as you say, to the back seat. And every time that President Trump says something, about these conflicts are bound relations is, You should ask Marco. You should ask Marco, you should ask Marco. So he's taking a role that is very prominent, but also is a role that has a lot of risks. But yeah, big risk, big reward. I think so. And this is the kind of moment in the Republican Party where they're looking for that transitional figure. Oh yeah.

Who can replace Donald Trump.

Like that's impossible. But they've got to have somebody who's got stature. And perhaps this is that moment. So we'll wait and see. Obviously this is not going to be over in four weeks. The way that the president said. Going to see this obviously spill over in lots of ways. So we'll keep talking about it. And we also know this has spilled over into other kinds of violence here in Texas. So investigators are looking into whether a man who killed three people and injured a dozen more outside a bar in Austin was motivated by the war in Iran. The gunman was wearing a sweatshirt that read Property of Allah. And there's at least a sense that perhaps the shooting has now become a kind of primary source when it comes to putting Islam at the center of Texas politics. How do you think this is going to play out in terms of the way that this, kind of primary cycle is sort of ending and the runoffs are beginning, but then you've got November to deal with as well. Right on the heels of that.

I mean, the fact of the matter that we get these, radicalized individuals, right, is extremely dangerous. Yeah. Is extremely dangerous because, emotionally and psychologically creates, people to be on the edge. You never know what's going to happen. It's a great point.

Yeah. You never know what's going to happen. But that.

Emotion drives people. Right? And that's, that's, an anxiety that, research has shown that that really motivates people to do X, Y, or Z, right, or vote for a particular candidate. Then candidates, on the other hand, react to that anxiety and create more, policies or promises that tend to be more radical in one way or the other. And then on the other hand, right. It's these, individuals actions that people tend to generalize. And then these generalizations are going to be extremely problematic for, not only, people that, practice Islam, but generally speaking, in terms of religion. Right. Because we have freedom of religion in this country. So the problem becomes very, very, very, complex in the sense of what are going to be the political ramifications and also are becoming, this person was a naturalized, immigrant. And that also creates another thing. So you have the confluence of two things, right, that are very volatile, right. And motivate a lot of people to go out and vote in the polls. Yeah. And I think you're seeing the echo of that for sure in a couple of different ways. You have 70 members of the Texas Legislature who have sent a letter to congressional leadership asking them to investigate and to freeze H-1, H-1b visas and to pause all immigration for the moment. Right. That's unlikely to happen. But you're seeing people like Representative Keith Self, representative Chip Roy, who's in a runoff for AG, both talk about, them being in the Sharia Free American Caucus. They've bragged about that, Chip Roy talked about how the shooter from Senegal had a Quran in his car. And we need to stop importing violent third World extremists. Dan Patrick, as we talked about weeks ago, has got preventing Sharia law on his list of to do items for the legislature. So there's a lot of churn in the legislature and the Republican side that's going to definitely prime this. So as you said, the emotions on this are really high. And I think obviously the politics of this are going to be connected to some of these big questions. So this won't be the end of this. It's really just the beginning of it. So when we talk about these legislative events down the road, just remember that this is sort of where things began, right?

Right. It really is a kind of I think your. Oh yeah, emotional moment. Speaking of emotions, you and I are up late watching returns, checking out all of the, you know, back and forth on, the primary, which has been pretty stunning. Let's talk at the very top of the ticket, because that was a nationalized race that had serious implications to the control of the Senate. Let's talk about the Democratic side. James Talarico has a squeaker of a win over Jasmine Crockett. Bit of a controversy because the Dallas County elections process was a little bit funky and people were confused about where to vote and how to vote. They changed from the precinct, from the county level voting to precinct level voting just for this cycle. And that made people basically turned away and they had to go to a different location. And of course, a confused voter is a non voter. So I'm sure that probably had some effect, enough of an effect to make the change here. Unknown. But regardless, Talarico has basically claimed victory. What do you make of this? Well, I mean, it was kind of, interesting to see, right? Because when you see the map, you see that, Talarico won, across the state, big urban areas were divided between, him and representative, Jasmine Crockett. So it was very interesting to see, I guess the ground game that Talarico started when he started his campaign. And that ground game could bring an advantage, especially for the general election. Another interesting thing is to see that, all the polls that we saw were 1,000%, all over the place, all over the place. And that makes me wonder, right? if the right people are doing the right polls. Because these opinion swings from Jasmine Crockett. is going to win one week before, and then. Yeah.

Oh. Wait, it's going to be Talarico by this, pollsters. He's like, no, that doesn't happen. Polling had her up like, oh yeah, no ten points plus no. Yeah.

No, that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen in the history of public opinion. Probably these folks should read some, public opinion literature. These public opinion shifts do not happen. Now, that realignment means that something extremely, extremely bad happened is not the Colbert effect. Yeah, people do not pay attention to that. So it is extremely, extremely rare to see those things, which means that, people are just doing polls. Yeah. Like, yeah, you have to do should not be in the polling business because it's actually hurting.

Right? Those people that actually know how to polls. I think that's a great point. And, it's, flawed in such a way as to basically make it almost meaningless and very troublesome to invest in. And we know these get headlines all over and honestly, they're often wrong, as we saw. And actually, if you look down ballot, there are a bunch of these kind of races where it was in the opposite direction. So let's get into some of these. Yeah, I you know, we talked about the fact that, you know, Crockett had started late. She ran kind of a not great campaign, a lot of sort of digital stuff, not a lot of sort of kind of establishment approach. That definitely created, I think, a real gap for her. So but she did perform really well in urban areas. The Democrats are going to have to figure out a way to pull that back together. Let's talk about the Republican side, Ken Paxton and, and, and John Cornyn. In a runoff, Cornyn ends up slightly ahead, which I'm kind of surprised about. Well, again, the polling had this incorrect, but, I think all that money spent on John Cornyn probably had a bit of an effect. Do you think that, that momentum will get him the Trump endorsement that he so, anxiously craves? But I think so, right. Because now it's going to be, ladies and gentlemen, 12 rounds of boxing. He's going to start today.

Yeah. And we're going to see that. And eventually, President Trump will have to make a decision. There is apparently bad blood between some members of the Trump administration and, the person that he's running, Ken Paxton, campaign. And also Ken Paxton brings, a lot of, luggage, right? A lot of baggage that perhaps may not play very well in the general election. I think that's the Republican's concern. And that is the key thing because they need to maintain the advantage and the Senate.

Right. Yeah.

So it's going to be a strategic decision. Maybe it's going to be, battle royale. You go for it. I'm not going to get into it. We'll see. It's going to be pretty ugly. The other thing to note is that there are a lot of runoffs, right? The attorney general is going to run off Mayes Middleton and Chip Roy, Christian Menefee and Al Green go into runoff. They're going to have seven elections in that district in the last 1.5 years. That's incredible. That's so much voting. They're so lucky.

Right? Tony Gonzalez is going to be in a runoff against Brandon Herrera. That could be a very tight race. Julie Johnson and Collin Allred in north Texas in a runoff Alex Mealler, Briscoe Cain in a runoff. What I'm saying is that we're going to be back here doing this again, talking about on the runoffs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One interesting note is that Dan Crenshaw lost the first Republican incumbent to lose and since 2014, to a very conservative challenger, Steve Toth. Crenshaw divided with Trump on the Ukraine. He called the Freedom Caucus grifters and said they were liars. But they got the last laugh. Cruz and Toth and yeah, Crenshaw is out of a job, so that was pretty interesting. Harris County, the judges races from both sides are going to go to a runoff. That's interesting too. What else struck you about this wild primary season? Well, also, Sid Miller lost. Yeah, To another incumbent. Losing.

Yeah. And, another, Well, as you say, the AG race surprised Middleton. Just, like, took off handedly and that's it.

But we're going to talk and go deep- er on all these races next week. I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

We'll see you next week. you next week. <Music>